Freedom of Information Act 2000 Request

How many charging decisions, including successful prosecutions, have been made against the police and CPS for failure to disclose, perverting the course of justice and corruption within the last three years

Request

I would like to enquire as to how many charging decisions, including successful prosecutions, have been made against the police and CPS for failure to disclose, perverting the course of justice and corruption (evidence tampering etc) within the last three years

Response

In order to establish the information you have requested, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), would require a manual review of individual case files. As a guide, during the three year period 2015-2018, the CPS made charging decision in respect of 832,013 suspects. The number of successful prosecution in period was 1,471,855 of prosecution case files.

Additionally, during the same financial years, there were 5,106 offences of perverting the course of justice commenced prosecution.

Section 12(1) of the FOI Act means public authorities are not obliged to comply with a request for information if it estimates the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for central government is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3.5 working days determining whether the department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

We believe that the cost of manually reviewing 5,106 offences of perverting the course of justice which equates to 3,627 individual case files would exceed the appropriate limit. Consequently, we are not obliged to comply with your request.

Under section 16 of the FOI Act there is a duty to provide advice and assistance; you may find it helpful to refer your request to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), as they hold a breakdown of prosecution records by offence. Please see link below: data.access@justice.gsi.gov.uk

Information Management Unit 020 3357 0899 IMU@cps.gov.uk